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This is the second in a series of posts about the ‘Explore Student Files’ section of the site. Today we are looking at the second tab in this section, ‘Date of Entry.’ The data in this tab can help explore connections between students based on when they officially entered the school. For instance, which students entered the Carlisle Indian School at the same time? When did groups of students from particular nations and tribes enter? At what times during the year did students enter the school? Did this vary over time?

To start exploring some of these questions, click the second tab, ‘Date of Entry’ in the ‘Explore Student Files’ section. Here you will find the number of student...

We would like to introduce a group of pages — a set of dynamic tables or lists — that can help you see and understand the student files, and the stories they represent, in new ways. The ‘Explore Student Files’ section of the site provides a way to examine the student files we’ve currently digitized from a variety of angles. It aims to help researchers sift through the documentation, notice patterns, select areas for further attention, and, in general, explore a variety of research questions that are difficult to answer through the standard browse pages on the site by themselves.

The tables are set up under the various tabs (as shown in the screenshot) in the ‘Explore Student Files’ section of...

A team of student interns, Rachel Kruchten '16, Justine Cenzer '18, and Frank Vitale '16, led by Friends of the Library Intern Suri Smith and Library Digital Projects Manager Don Sailer, are currently undertaking a three-week long scanning trip in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.! The team hopes to scan all remaining student files for the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, and to capture images and scans of various administrative and ephemeral records. The team is excited to be back in Washington and at the National Archives.

We are pleased to add a new photograph to our collection of Carlisle Indian School images, thanks to the generosity of Laura Bullock. The photograph on this postcard shows students who are members of the Class of 1909. Unfortunately, the individuals in this photograph have not yet been identified. This item will be available in the Image collection soon. We want to thank Ms. Bullock for her generosity in donating this image to our collection.

Additional browse and filter options have again been added to the site! After you click on a tag, such as for nation, a format, or a person’s name, you will notice some additional tabs near the top of the page. These allow you to limit results to “Student Files Only” or “Images Only.” With these new tabs, you will have access to all the filter options you enjoy on the main browse pages on the site, except now additionally limited to whichever tag you clicked.

For example, if you were looking at the Sarah Mather Student File (see example screenshots; click the image for more). You see that she was a member of the Sioux nation, and you want to see what else you can find in the Digital Resource Center for that nation. Clicking the tag, you are given a list of all the records...

A fourth trip to continue scanning student files at the National Archives in Washington, DC is off to a snowy start. Dickinson College student interns Linda Genser ‘17, Joelle Paull ‘17, and Meghan Abercrombie ‘15 join Friends of the Library Intern Katie Clark, for a two week research trip. The team hopes to scan another 30 boxes of student files for the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

Linda and Joelle have previously done work editing and posting scanned copies of student files to the website, so they are enjoying the opportunity to work with the original, physical documents. Meghan recently curated a small display of Carlisle Indian School publications for the Dickinson College Archives, and she is now excited to be learning more about the students themselves...

In the process of describing and uploading thousands of documents to this website, mistakes occasionally slip through our review process. With this in mind, we have added a button for submitting corrections. The button appears at the bottom of each posting on the site for student files and images. Please let us know if you find any typographical or other errors in our descriptions and tags for these documents and photographs so they can be corrected for future users. Simply click the button and fill out the brief form provided (see example screenshots).

In some cases, the information recorded on the old documents themselves may be in error. Students' names, birthdates, family members' names, and other facts may have been written incorrectly by the staff members who worked at the...

Browse pages for Student Files, Images, Publications, and Lists & Rosters now include additional functionality to better support research and exploration. Users can now customize how many records are displayed per page, as well as their sort order. For instance, if you want to view files of students from a particular nation and list them in chronological order, the new browse options make this easy (Click on the image to view the example screenshot).

The improved browse pages also present statistics on the total number of records found matching particular criteria and what range is being currently displayed on the page. This makes it easy to discover how many student files currently available on the site represent students from a particular nation, or contain a particular...

The Summer 2014 issue of Dickinson Magazine includes an article that features the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. In “Reclaiming History,” Rick Kearns explains:

"Of those who attended, many entered careers as teachers, tradesmen and athletes — including Frank Mount Pleasant, Dickinson class of 1910, who competed in the 1908 summer Olympics in London. Others, cut off from their native languages, identities and families of origin, entered a legacy of trauma and disenfranchisement. All of them have stories to tell, and now, more than 130 years later, their descendants, as well as researchers and archivists, have unprecedented access...